Fort McMurray has a bad reputation. En route from Montreal, a visitor is warned about the place: “There’s a lot of booze,” a knitting grandmother says, voice dropping to a whisper, “and drugs.” Boom towns and oil sands have unhealthy associations for good reasons, too. From the air, though, Alberta’s Fort McMurray isn’t Mordor; it looks like a lush valley where two rivers meet.

You get another surprise when you land at a fine new airport. It’s been years since the dinky ’80s terminal was able to handle the traffic, and the number of travellers went up 25 per cent last year, so the $258-million new building was badly needed. It opened in June. “The people coming today will never know how bad it was,” says airport authority CEO Scott Clement with justified pride. From the new terminal, you can see the old concrete blip across the runway and wonder.

The new building is a Nordic hunk by the B.C. firm of Mcfarlane Biggar Architects and Designers. It is full of the standard energy-efficient technologies, and the design is dominated by tanned steel panels and ceilings of blond pine recovered from B.C.’s infested forests. There’s even an elegant treed courtyard that will lead to a hotel, still to come. Departures and arrivals share an enormous hall, which makes for a refreshingly straightforward building compared to Toronto or Montreal’s labyrinths. The new airport is surprising; it feels thoughtful and expensive, like a physical statement of local ambition.

The impression barely survives a trip out the door. From the stupefying parking lot, the building represents Fort McMurray’s contradictions. The spirit that can build the best airport in the North, negotiate a new kind of infrastructure deal with the province to pay for highways, and govern a municipality bigger than Nova Scotia can’t build a garage. The city’s tourism CEO, Frank Creasy, explains that it “would have been too expensive.”

Even boom towns have budgets. But building a parking lot in which you could host the Olympics isn’t simply an economic decision. A functional airport doesn’t need German steel panels, either, but somebody decided they were worth the money. They are, and so is infrastructure to support density. But, for some reason, Fort McMurray, a best-case new town in Canada with the youngest population and the highest household income, is choosing to recreate the sprawl that others are desperately trying (some with more effort) to fix.

The current oil slump aside, the municipality’s population will double by 2030 and they will live in endless tracts of vinyl siding, cheap to build but not to buy; the average house price was $740,000 in 2012. These could be clones of Edmonton and Calgary’s metastasized suburbs, and this awful, low-density development is even more inappropriate for a northern town surrounded by muskeg and oil leases, where land is at a premium. It’s a waste of land, energy and money. There must be a better way and, if Fort McMoney can’t afford to find it, who can?

But it’s easier to copy a Scandinavian waste treatment plant that will heat greenhouses to grow lettuce, or to make the world’s biggest rec centre even bigger, or to plan a hockey arena that might one day encourage a developer to build downtown. These projects are achievements that confound Fort McMurray’s image as an overgrown work camp, sure, but they are easy pickings compared to the housing challenge. “People only want detached homes,” deputy mayor Allan Vinni explains, but this common sense evaporates when they are offered an alternative. Suddenly, he says, there are condo towers everywhere. Look at Calgary.

The new airport is built to a higher standard than the rest of Fort McMurray, but should the airport be the best building in a city? Vinni’s measure of success is that the average commute is “not as bad as Toronto.” This is the kind of ambition you’d expect from a depressed fishing village, not the nation’s boom town, not a place with the means to try things others only dream about. The new airport shows Fort McMurray can lead in the North—when they want. The municipality’s motto is, “We have the energy.” Wouldn’t it be ironic if they lacked the guts?

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/fort-mcmurray-has-a-chance-to-do-urban-planning-better-so-why-doesnt-it/feed/0Eco-buildings may be good for the planet—but what about occupants?http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/eco-buildings-may-be-good-for-the-planet-but-what-about-occupants/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/eco-buildings-may-be-good-for-the-planet-but-what-about-occupants/#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:59 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=614215Virtuous they are, but eco-certified 'green' buildings can be terrible for your health

When Toronto’s Superkül architecture firm was asked to build a sleek modernist house in Mulmur, Ont., the designers used a decidedly unscientific method to select the materials. They asked the client to handle and sniff one building product after another, as they watched for adverse reactions. Sometimes all it took was pulling an item out of its box, says Andre D’Elia, a principal at the firm. Most of the no-nos involved recycled content; first-generation materials worked best. The firm’s +House is green, aiming for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certification. But it goes further to ensure health for its environmentally sensitive client.

While clever marketing has associated green buildings with health in the public imagination, some environmental standards, such as LEED, have come under attack for being lax on air quality. A hundred years ago, buildings were forgivingly full of air holes. “You could have the cat die in the basement and no one might notice,” says Stephen Collette, a building biologist in Lakefield, Ont. Buildings have become more energy efficient—which, in the midst of a climate crisis, most agree is a good thing. But they have also become increasingly airtight, which can exacerbate air quality problems, says Collette. “A green building must be healthy for the occupants, not just healthy for the planet,” says Tang Lee, professor of architecture at the University of Calgary.

Some demur, saying this could only be the case in buildings that pay lip service to being green. Truly green buildings must be holistically designed, says Seattle’s Jason F. McLennan, creator of the rigorous green standard Living Building Challenge (LBC). They must take into account issues including material toxicity, mould and moisture migration, outdoor air quality at any given time, indoor air quality, and ventilation rates, he says. But most green buildings today are not designed or built to such exacting standards.

The first airtight buildings were mould factories. The invention of the heat recovery ventilator (HRV) helped by allowing stale indoor air to be exchanged for fresh outdoor air with little energy waste. But an estimated half of all HRVs are improperly installed and many more aren’t correctly operated or maintained. “Many occupants have no idea how the HRV works,” says Collette.

For +House, Superkül used age-old passive ventilation techniques—also known as windows and skylights—to ensure the building would breathe. With these open, “it feels like you’re outside,” says D’Elia. The house also uses hospital-grade air filters along with HRVs in cold weather. But the air quality challenges in many buildings may be beyond what any HRV can handle. Building products have become increasingly toxic over the last 50 years. Today’s buildings may contain as many as 360 different chemicals, emanating from carpets, cleaning products, photocopiers and printers—a problem only partly addressed by mechanical ventilation. “If you have a skunk in the house, do you open a window or do you get rid of the skunk?” asks Collette.

The first green standard to call attention to materials toxicity was McLennan’s. Since its launch in 2006, all 14 “worst-in-class” chemicals on its redlist have been banned from fully certified projects. These include asbestos, lead and mercury, but also pthalates, used in plastics and vinyl, and flame retardants, used in electronics, furniture and textiles. But only five buildings worldwide have achieved full LBC certification to date.

Other more mainstream green standards are now jumping on the bandwagon. The newest version of the LEED standard, with more than 1,700 buildings certified in Canada, awards points for choosing materials bearing health product declaration labels. But these points aren’t mandatory, so it’s still possible for a building containing toxic materials to achieve platinum, the highest LEED certification.

Superkül’s unorthodox methods for keeping toxins out of +House got their biggest test on the client’s move-in day. “She said she loved it, and she didn’t feel anything,” says D’Elia. Mission accomplished.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/eco-buildings-may-be-good-for-the-planet-but-what-about-occupants/feed/1What you’ll find on the new Macleans.cahttp://www.macleans.ca/general/introducing-macleans-ca/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/introducing-macleans-ca/#commentsWed, 05 Mar 2014 21:50:14 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=516789Easier navigation, bolder images and a better reading experience. However you want to join the conversation, we are ready where you are

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Introducing the new Macleans.ca: improved and redesigned to deliver on multiple platforms the rich experience that makes Maclean’s Canada’s most read, most indispensable source of news, opinion and analysis.

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No element of the modern home—not the spanking-new Vitamix blender to juice you into a Gwyneth Paltrow glow, nor the George Clooney-endorsed Nespresso machine—better reflects how we live now than the ubiquitous kitchen island. Once a statement of wealth for those with significant kitchen real estate and willingness to drop thousands of dollars on now-passé granite, the island is now perceived as a mass-market necessity. Nearly 40 per cent of kitchens planned by Ikea Canada feature some sort of ?xed island on customer request, reports company spokeswoman Alicia Zoffranieri. Homebuyers at both high- and mid-price ranges expect an island, says Toronto real estate agent Laura Fernandez. Where space is a consideration, people sacrifice the formal dining room for the island-centric kitchen-family-room combination, she says: “The island is important as an extra work area that often houses the sink and the dishwasher, as well as an eating and ‘breakfast counter,’ ” a term that real estate agents love.

The island’s popularity reflects practical and psychological needs in a stressed-out, time-strapped era. They’re a helicopter parent’s must-have. “I don’t know how you can parent without an island,” says Toronto psychologist Alex Russell. “How do you cook a nutritious dinner and monitor screen time and homework at the same time? Impossible! Impossible! You have to have a kitchen island.”

As the household hub, the island multi-tasks with the family. For wannabe Angela Harnetts, it’s a chef’s table allowing guests to mingle and watch their host. For over-scheduled modern-day Swiss Family Robinsons, it’s a place to commune with iPads and iPods while tuning one another out.

But the island as we know it, and need it, is being recast, if style-setters have their way. Lynda Reeves, for one, is no longer a fan. For a time now, the House & Home publisher has called for a moratorium on the bulky design staple. More than half of the houses she goes into have fixed islands, Reeves says with a shudder: “They’re like coffins in the middle of the room.” Often, they’ve required rewiring and plumbing with little net gain, she says: “Nobody wants to sit at a counter and look at a messy sink.”

Reeves believes the idea of the kitchen island is here to stay—only those now in vogue are airier, stand-alone “work stations” with a wood, metal or stone top. (Reeves’s own kitchen contains a 12-foot-long marble-topped table that doubles for dining.)

Slagging the old-school island, in fact, has become a marketing tool. San Francisco-based March launched its line of beautiful work tables last year as “an alternative to the monolithic kitchen island.” With prices ranging from $5,600 to $13,800 (excluding “accessories,” such as $1,400 black-ash baskets and a $550 zinc bin), they’re the new status item. And they’re not alone, with the arrival of products destined to summon island envy. Boffi’s coveted MiniKitchen by designer Joe Colombo, for instance, costs close to $30,000. Reeves raves about Bluthaup’s sleek, sculptural steel workbench series comprised of modular units—cooktops, sinks and work surfaces—that can be rearranged at will. A desire for flexibility is behind the rising popularity of islands on wheels, says Dallas interior designer Jeffrey Johnson: “It’s multi-purpose, and a better way to serve entertainment needs.”

Just as the fixed island was a response to a need to gather, display and house appliances, the new workbenches reflect a shifting emphasis on the artisanal and the authentic. Of course, people who buy their organic produce at farmers’ markets and spend weekends pickling and canning want a kitchen that channels a Tuscan farmhouse or Parisian patisserie, not Carmela Soprano’s Jersey spread. Reeves can relate: “Bulky islands are so suburban.”

So it’s not surprising that the traditional island has itself been voted off the island. That’s what happens to trends when they migrate from high end to Home Depot. Meanwhile, count on the masses to huddle around those granite-topped coffins: There’s comforting warmth to be derived from them still.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/a-granite-island-how-declasse-3/feed/0Top 5 Canadian designs making the world a better placehttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/top-5-canadian-designs-making-the-world-a-better-place/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/top-5-canadian-designs-making-the-world-a-better-place/#commentsFri, 07 Dec 2012 21:02:32 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=325248Earthcycle Packaging1. Lucky iron fish: When Cambodian villagers were hemorrhaging during childbirth due to a lack of iron, University of Guelph researcher Christopher Charles found an answer—throw a small…

1. Lucky iron fish: When Cambodian villagers were hemorrhaging during childbirth due to a lack of iron, University of Guelph researcher Christopher Charles found an answer—throw a small chunk of iron, designed to look like a local river fish, into cooking pots. The result: a huge decrease in anemia. “The iron fish is incredibly powerful,” says Charles.

2. Double-red traffic light: One in 10 Canadian men are colour-blind, a potential problem when driving. But in Quebec, Omer Martineau’s double-red traffic light design helps drivers distinguish between frequency and shape, proving that two reds are probably better than one.

3. Water Bobble: Each year an estimated 100 million plastic bottles flow through Toronto’s waste system. But the Water Bobble bottle, by Karim Rashid, has a replaceable carbon filter able to filter chlorine and contaiments from up to 150 l of water, all for $9.99 a Bobble.

4. Palm fibre packaging: Earthcycle Packaging, based in B.C., with design company Tangram, created compostable palm fibre packaging. Earthcycle’s coffee holders and produce netting decompose in about six months.

5. The Nouse: The Nouse—or “nose as mouse”—is from the National Research Council of Canada and allows disabled users to control computers with the tip of their nose and to click with a double-blink.

Source: David Berman, author of Do Good Design

Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The answers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.

Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.

One of the more interesting revelations to come out of Apple’s management shuffle this week, which saw iOS software head Scott Forstall turfed because of the Maps fiasco, is the apparent war on skeuomorphism inside One Infinite Loop. For those who aren’t design-minded, a skeuomorph is a product design element that hints at something which previously served a functional role (like spokes on a car’s hub caps).

Forstall was a big proponent of using these sorts of ornamental—some say “tacky”— flourishes in Apple’s software: the green velvet background of the games application, the leather binding on iCal or the wooden bookshelf in Newsstand. The late Steve Jobs also favoured the approach, believing it helped put a soft edge on the sometimes cold world of technology. In fact, Jobs instructed Apple’s software designers to use a linen-like texture in the iPhone’s notifications menu, which is swiped down like a roman blind.

Yet, despite selling millions of iPhone and iPads, many within Apple are concerned the company’s software is beginning to look gaudy and dated, particularly now that rival Microsoft has come out with a clean, ultra-modern looking OS with Windows Phone 8. That includes hardware design guru Jonathan Ive, who favours simple, minimalist designs that perfectly marry function and aesthetics. With Forstall gone, Ive will now play a bigger role in overseeing Apple’s software design. There’s little doubt what the result will be.

Totally abandoning Apple’s quirky software may not be a wise strategy, however. Under Jobs, Apple won over many consumers because its products were not only beautiful, but imbued with a sense of whimsy. The computers spoke with goofy voices. E-book pages peeled away pleasingly when you flipped them. Notes are typed on a yellow legal pad. Sure, it can be hokey at times. But when done well, it made using Apple’s sleek products feel that much more special. It may not be high design, but it’s the same reason luxury car-makers opt for faux wood trim and analog clocks on their increasingly digital dashboards: customers love it. And they’re the ones Apple needs to keep happy in an increasingly competitive smartphone market.

Frank Gehry, 83, was initially asked to design Ike’s Washington memorial. Few, however, appear pleased with his designs. The Toronto-born architect wanted to focus on Eisenhower’s humble roots, which bothered conservatives who said that would diminish the legacy he built up during his later years. His family agreed.

Gehry then wanted to erect metal mesh screens around the four-acre plot to hide the drab neighbouring office buildings. Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan said the screens brought to mind the Iron Curtain, comparing the memorial to those created for Marx, Engels and Lenin. “That was the point at which I could have left the stage,” said Gehry. Perhaps he should have.

Last week, a congressional committee nixed nearly $60 million in funding for the memorial, reflecting growing concern over the controversies. Gehry, however, is pushing ahead. Hope is not lost, says Chris Kelley Cimko, spokesperson for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. After all, she says, “It took some 40 years to build the Roosevelt memorial.”

The spherical Nexus Q, the new Google device Jesse Brown writes about with critical insight here, is meant to connect your TV, stereo speakers and the movies you’ve rented online. It’s interesting as a bid by Google to grab a technological edge, but the lack of edges on the thing itself is also worth noting.

Roundness is the obvious antidote to the persistent linearity of modern design. Your phone is a rectangle. So is your iPod. The mid-century modern look that defines mainstream cool now more than ever is dominated by corners and cubes and clean lines. Think of the Mad Men offices (or read about the show’s look here). When we talk about the way we’re connected to the world, we use a metaphor of infinite right angles: the grid.

But the Nexus Q follows in the lineage (as I must put it since curveage isn’t yet a word) of design attempts to break out of the box by going round. The great Canadian contribution was, of course, the Clairtone Project G stereo line, with its globular black speakers that look quite a lot like precursors to Google’s new offering.

Eichlers in the San Mateo Highlands (thomasfj/Flickr)

It has been widely noted that Steve Jobs, Apple’s late founder and almost inarguably the greatest influence on consumer design in recent decades, was raised in a Joseph Eichler modernist house, with uncluttered lines and nice, straight roof beams exposed to the impressionable eye. Still, looking at old pictures of Eichler’s California houses, I can picture a Project G stereo fitting in perfectly.

So perhaps the sphere shouldn’t be regarded as a rival to the cube, but as visual relief or even some sort of complementary counterbalance. At Expo 67, come to think of it, there was Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, where we dreamed of living, but also Buckminster Fuller’s U.S. pavilion, where we went for diversion.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/googles-new-spheres-and-the-shape-of-design/feed/1All work and some playhttp://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/all-work-and-some-play-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/all-work-and-some-play-2/#commentsFri, 18 May 2012 13:52:41 +0000http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=40103Why Canadian office buildings are adding slides

The music is spilling out the back door of Corus Entertainment’s headquarters on Toronto’s lakefront. The building’s soaring glass atrium is a kaleidoscope of green, pink and purple, the colour of women in spring dresses refracted through hundreds of wine glasses inside. Taxis pull up; men in suits open doors.

Corus isn’t a nightclub, but the multi-platform media company is celebrating the 10th anniversary of W Network at its trendy office building, which was designed with fun in mind. Even with all the eye candy, guests crane their necks to get a glimpse of the building’s centrepiece: a three-storey slide.

A few blocks northwest at Grip Limited, an advertising agency, they’re pouring beer from the office taps as workers arrive from the sixth floor via a big orange chute for the weekly get-together. Around the world—at Google in California, Lego in Denmark, Red Bull in London and online insurance company iSelect in Australia—office slides are part of the plan to attract and keep talented young workers. Two more will be built inside the University of British Columbia’s new student union building, scheduled to open in 2014.

At Corus, chief technology officer Scott Dyer oversaw the project to design and construct the ultra-modern headquarters, which opened in 2010. The building has improved employee satisfaction as measured on internal surveys. “I do a lot of tours,” he says. “One of the things I hear at the end of every tour is, ‘Are you hiring?’ ”

Jaimie Galloro, 35, watches cartoons for a living, which is also known as quality control. She uses the slide most days. “It’s a little break from our days,” she says. “When I first heard about it, I immediately thought of recess in elementary school.” And, she adds, “the novelty has not worn off.” Employees are trained in slide safety, including the red-light/green-light system that prevents pileups, and can dive down any time they want. Guests are welcome too.

Over at Grip, creative partner Rich Pryce-Jones, 44, gave designer Johnson Chou a mandate to create a “young and vibrant” space in 2006. That’s when Chou proposed the slide. “It was about creating a space that would inspire those working within it.” He was inspired by Italian fashion designer Miuccia Prada, who leaves her third-floor Milan office via tube. Chou was worried the idea wouldn’t fly with Pryce-Jones, but he was an enthusiastic supporter. “I’d always wanted to put a slide in my house, so when Johnson came back with this idea, I was like, ‘Yeah, totally, you’ve got to do that!’ ”

It added $15,000 to the budget, but it was worth it, says Harvey Carroll, Grip’s 41-year-old president. When college and university students visit, the slide is a star attraction. It was useful in attracting young talent as the company grew from 80 people in 2006 to 180 today, many of whom work on interactive ad campaigns for companies like Honda, Expedia and Labatt.

Not everyone is ready to take the plunge. Leslie Van Duzer, the director of UBC’s school of architecture and landscape architecture, says slides are part of a trend to encourage people to take a break and play a bit, which sparks creativity and new ideas. She just doesn’t think chutes are an intelligent way to do that. They can be arresting, because people expect to see them in playgrounds, not office buildings, “which causes people to reflect on their expectations.” Although “those moments in architecture can be very powerful,” slides remind her of the visual gags of the ’80s, when buildings had columns that didn’t reach the ceiling, for example. “I think most of us look back on that and cringe a little bit,” she says. “Architecture that has a joke in it just isn’t funny after you see it a couple times.”

At Grip, Chou says the slide makes sense because it reflects the company’s culture. “To call it a gag is like somebody buying a sports car and being criticized because it’s childish.”

Fad or the future, slides are fun—and fast. It takes Galloro about 10 seconds to get from her third-floor workspace to the first floor. That’s a bonus at Corus, where it means never being late for the party.

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]]>http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/all-work-and-some-play-2/feed/0Pharaoh’s good-eating guidehttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/pharaohs-good-eating-guide/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/pharaohs-good-eating-guide/#commentsSun, 29 May 2011 16:43:14 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=194535Someday, the USDA Food Pyramid will be a core case study in disaster for design students. The New York Times reports that the administration is reversing the incomprehensible 2005 decision…

]]>Someday, the USDA Food Pyramid will be a core case study in disaster for design students. The New York Times reports that the administration is reversing the incomprehensible 2005 decision to divide the famous pyramid into coloured wedges instead of labelled ascending slices. This was an idea which, and stop me if this seems obvious, contradicted the whole pretext for a pyramid-shaped infographic. You depict something as a pyramid when you want to imply a quantitatively large and fundamental base—in the ideal diet, whole grains and vegetables—and a smaller, less important top, which in the original plan for the pyramid was basically occupied by meat and eggs. The Meat ’n’ Eggs Lobby (i.e., the agriculture industry that the USDA exists to serve) didn’t like the hierarchical implications, and so the pyramid became, in the words of a nutritionist quoted by the Times, a diagram “which basically conveys no useful information”.

I’m eager to see the new circular “plate” that will replace the pyramid this week. The government doesn’t want to call it a “pie chart”, although homemade pies in round tins seem pretty low on the list of public-health threats in the year 2011. The archetypal chubby kid in old black-and-white comedies who made a habit of stealing pies off window sills was at least playing outside and getting a fair amount of fruit; he’d be considered a paragon of health now.

A few years ago Barbra Streisand was in crisis: the stonework on her primary residence was a tad too pale. So she turned to America’s doyenne of home betterment who, of course, had a solution. “Martha Stewart told me that if I brushed it with cow urine and buttermilk it would turn darker,” Streisand writes in her new book My Passion for Design, a glossy coffee-table tome that chronicles the painstaking creation of her four-house Malibu compound—and gives new meaning to the term vanity press.

The legendary performer, said to insist that rose petals be floating in the toilet bowls of her hotel rooms, felt sullied by the thought of bovine pee. So she ignored Martha’s advice, choosing instead to plant ivy and climbing roses to mask the offending rocks.

Streisand is famous for her obsession with detail (before appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2003, she insisted a black microphone be painted white so as not to clash with her ivory Donna Karan outfit). Her insistence on privacy is equally legendary, which makes the arrival of this over-the-top show-all so surprising. In 2003, she slapped an environmental preservation group with a US$50-million lawsuit for uploading an aerial photograph of her former clifftop estate. The case was thrown out but gave rise to the “Streisand effect,” the term used to describe the viral publicity generated when someone tries to quash online information.

Now, however, Streisand’s controlling the imagery, even taking the photographs and touring readers through her creative process. First, the bucolic exterior—a pond with water lilies and black and white koi fish coordinated to the colour of the woodwork, rose and vegetable gardens, and chickens who lay pale green eggs. A little artifice was required to achieve the effect. The “simple country stream” was fashioned from concrete and rebar; the stones on winding paths were weathered to look like horse hooves clomped on them. “Everything you see on the grounds was carefully planned to look natural,” she writes without a trace of irony.

Streisand then takes the reader inside—the interiors and her psyche. First, “the Millhouse,” really a garage, with its vintage water wheel that required special highway permits to transport, and an ersatz The Wizard of Oz-inspired storm cellar. Next, Streisand’s pride and glory: “the Barn,” a newly constructed colonial/Arts and Crafts/Shaker mash-up based on her vision of a “1904 farmhouse”—eight bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a great room with a 29-foot ceiling, a screening room, a “loft/gym,” a “Napping Room,” and a faux Victorian “street of shops” in the basement. Then, on to “Grandma’s House,” a rose-crusted, quilt-crammed guest cottage, and the blandly traditional eight-bedroom, 11-bathroom “Main House,” where Streisand lives with her very patient husband James Brolin.

Why Streisand decided to publish a book at this moment is never plainly stated, so one is forced to speculate. Is she legacy-building? Or looking to sell? She writes that the book was motivated by a desire to share her love of design. That’s hardly unique in today’s Hollywood, where Brad Pitt pals around with Frank Gehry and names his daughter Shiloh Nouvel after French architect Jean Nouvel. New money loves to broadcast newly acquired taste, be it William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon or Jerry Seinfeld showing off his East Hampton mansion in Vogue.

But Streisand’s “intense relationship with furniture,” as she puts it, and her compulsive need for control is far more complex, dating back to her “near poverty” childhood and the death of her father when she was 15 months old. “If you don’t like your surroundings you have to use your imagination to create a world you do like,” she writes.

Deprived of dolls as a child, she’d fill a hot water bottle and pretend it was a baby. (That could explain the pathology of the basement “street of shops” with its Disneyfied “ye olde” air. There’s a “Sweet Shop” with frozen yogourt and popcorn machines; an “Antique Shop” with her vintage apparel; a “Gift Shoppe” for selecting and wrapping presents; and “Bee’s Doll Shop,” where the 68-year-old plays with dollhouses wired with electricity.)

This compulsion to acquire and recreate tableaux is not new. As her wealth grew, Streisand became a knowledgable collector of art and furniture—everything from Louis XV to Frank Lloyd Wright. When it served her purpose, she allowed her houses to be photographed, notably for a 1993 Architectural Digest cover story on her art deco Hollywood house, which generated publicity just months before her entire deco collection was auctioned off, netting US$5.8 million. By then, she’d tired of the period and was on to her next phase: Americana, inspired by the 1992 election of her good friend Bill Clinton. “I fell in love with America all over again,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. So off she went to study wares in the Winterthur Museum and Monticello, and stockpile naive art, quilts and 18th-century American interpretations of Chippendale and Queen Anne.

The Yentl and The Prince of Tides director approached the six-year construction and furnishing of the Barn as if helming a movie. Here, the story veers into rich territory for satire as Streisand brings in set designers and architects to realize her vision, then tosses them like Kleenex when they fail. Work that didn’t meet her exacting standards was ripped out and redone, to the point of absurdity. Hand-stencilled wallpaper for one bathroom was sent back two times. One builder walked when Streisand balked over a two-inch discrepancy in antique beams. After the barnboards shrank in colder weather and the white wrapper around the insulation showed through, she had workmen paint each gap black with a tiny brush. As a taskmaster, Streisand achieves the impossible: she makes Martha Stewart seem low-maintenance.

One story is telling: watching the movie Gosford Park, Streisand fell in love with the glass-paned walls in the servants’ work area and wanted a facsimile of them outside the Barn’s gym. But after they were installed, her Universal machine—the one whose unsightly black dots she had painted white—could be seen from downstairs, so she gave it away.

“I’m a person who doesn’t believe in the word no,” Streisand writes. Brolin offered occasional reality checks, to little effect. He bristled, she reveals, when she wanted to lacquer rustic, humble beams: “My husband thought I was crazy.” She did it anyway.

The book cries out for Brolin’s version of events. But readers will have to settle for Streisand’s portrayal of him as a uxorious husband, willing to put up with her spending holidays online, shopping eBay or tracking the perfect finial. The marriage is blissful, by her report: the couple share late-night massages and rendezvous occasionally in the Napping Room. Such is her devotion that she permitted Brolin’s StairMaster to remain in the Barn’s gym, even though it can be viewed from downstairs. “But that’s love,” she writes.

The Barn, like the book, will doubtless delight fans of Streisand’s music, even though it’s a stage set, literally: the couple doesn’t sleep there or use the rooms, save for the odd dinner party, nap, screening and Brolin’s workouts. Streisand’s happy just to walk through it, she says.

What it all cost is never discussed, though the Chippendale dining chairs in the Main House, signed by Samuel Walton circa 1775, alone would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That tally might explain Streisand’s commitment to the Meet the Fockers franchise and her decision to sell 500 pieces of furniture at auction last year.

Don’t expect her to field any questions. Her one publicity outing was on Oprah last week, where Winfrey called the book “aspirational” and the “perfect Christmas gift,” allowing: “Not everyone can do this, of course.”

Not everyone would want to. My Passion for Design has a decidedly fin de siècle feel, that whiff of Dynasty tackiness that results from too much of anything—even good taste. “God is in the details,” Streisand states, referencing architect Mies van der Rohe. Of his equally famous adage, “Less is more,” she appears oblivious.

As she also does to the fact America is a far different place now than when she broke ground last century. Shipping white pine boards across the country for an “authentic” East Coast feel on the West Coast is as environmentally tone-deaf as stuffing her air-conditioned “root cellar” with Aquafina bottled water (a jarring bit of product placement). Still, Oprah’s right: the book is the perfect Christmas present, if only as a crass reminder of the way we were.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/barbraland/feed/1Changing the face of Washingtonhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/changing-the-face-of-washington/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/changing-the-face-of-washington/#commentsThu, 14 Oct 2010 17:00:30 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=151517A number of Canada’s top architects have been leaving their mark on the American capital

Washington likes its buildings imposing, their walls stone-solid—and the activities inside concealed and guarded 24-7. The city’s century-old height limit preserves the iconic views of the Capitol at the cost of imposing a bulky and boxy shape on most large buildings, from concrete government complexes to cookie-cutter condo developments. But lately, a stream of Canadian architects have been bringing a different touch.

On Oct. 25 the American capital will see the gala opening of the biggest new cultural complex since the Kennedy Center opened in 1971: the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theatre, built on the Washington waterfront by Vancouver-based Bing Thom Architects. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are the honorary chairs of the event.

The 200,000-sq.-foot complex is in many ways a very un-Washington building. Instead of imposing, it is playful. Instead of opaque, it is wrapped in a curving wall of 35,000 sq. feet of transparent glass. In the place of neoclassical columns that adorn so much of the city’s official architecture, there is a decidedly West Coast feature: five-metre wood columns—made by B.C.-based StructureCraft Builders out of Parallam, a material engineered from strands of the province’s Douglas firs—that rise around the building like streamlined totem poles supporting an expansive cantilevered roof. To build the unique structure, the architects said they had to prove the material’s strength and fire resistance, and get a local building code amendment. The elliptical beams, a metre in diameter, taper as they near the floor—making the columns seem lighter, as if giant trees had put on ballet shoes and risen up en pointe. “I’m very proud of it because we need to look at using wood in new ways,” said Bing Thom in an interview, adding, “We have this memory of the timber war with the U.S.—this is the Canadian revenge.”

Early in his career, Thom worked on the early stages of Arthur Erickson’s Canadian Embassy building that stands on the ceremonial route between the Capitol and the White House. That building mixed modernism with a fanciful take on Washington’s traditional architecture. Since then, more Canadian architects have been making their mark. In 2004, the National Museum of the American Indian was opened on the National Mall, across from the Capitol. The curving structure, reminiscent of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, was initially designed by Alberta-born native architect Douglas Cardinal. In 2007, Sidney Harman Hall, which houses Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, opened to acclaim; it was designed by Toronto architect Jack Diamond, who designed Toronto’s new Opera House and Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre.

Moshe Safdie, the Israeli-Canadian architect, designed the headquarters of the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms, which opened in 2008, and the headquarters of the National Institute of Peace, which is rising on a choice piece of land overlooking the National Mall and the Potomac River. To be opened next year, it features a striking roof in the shape of a soaring white dove. And another contribution to monumental Washington is under way. Toronto-born Frank Gehry has been chosen to build a monument to president Dwight Eisenhower. It is to include huge tapestries made of woven metal.

Thom’s wooden columns, which work in a bow configuration with steel tension cables, were not the only innovation in the US$135-million Arena Stage project. The Arena theatre company had a major problem: how to save its two existing, aging theatres without demolishing them. Built in 1961, in the low-slung concrete “brutalist” style by the same designer who designed Washington metro stations, they had played a role in theatre history. The 683-seat Fichandler theatre, with a central stage that gives it the feeling of a boxing ring, was America’s first desegregated regional theatre, one that gave its start to James Earl Jones and other actors. But it was poorly soundproofed, and in the middle of a play the audience might hear buses whizzing by, sirens from a motorcade, planes approaching Reagan National Airport, or even the presidential helicopter coming down the Potomac. While other architects suggested bulldozing the old theatres or moving them elsewhere, Thom’s solution was simply to envelop them completely with a new building.

The seats in the Fichandler were reupholstered, and the concrete walls merely washed with soap and water. Reflectors were installed on the ceiling to bounce voices back to the audience. Likewise, the company’s other theatre, the 514-seat Kreeger Theater, was given better acoustics and new upholstery. A spacious new lobby, box offices, administrative offices, cafeteria, and set-building spaces rose around and in between the historic structures. The entire complex was spanned by one enormous roof. “My idea was we should not walk away from the past,” said Thom, whose Canadian creations include the Chan Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver.

The Arena design mixes past with future by adding a new experimental studio theatre—but one that dispenses with the traditional stark “black box” shape for an unusual elliptical form. Called the Kogod “Cradle,” it is meant to be a place where new plays and actors can, literally, be raised and nurtured. Rather than entering the intimate space from the spacious lobby, the design forces theatregoers to wander up a spiralling ramp the length of a football field, whose progressively increasing soundproofing slowly leaves behind the din of the public spaces, and carries them into the womblike Cradle, whose walls are lined with undulating slats of poplar that help diffuse sound.

While Thom doesn’t see a particular style that unites all of the proliferating Canadian-designed projects that are remaking the face of Washington, he does see a “Canadian sensitivity” to working with clients and surrounding communities. His theatre complex is transparent and open to the public throughout the day, rather than only at performance time. “In the U.S., private property is defended so rigorously, whereas in Canada there is a softer division between public and private. Maybe we are more socially conscious of the intermingling of the public and private realm,” he said. Whatever the case, Thom is not finished with Washington. His next project is to convert an abandoned high school into a museum for the celebrated Rubell family collection of contemporary art, just a few blocks from the Arena Stage.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/changing-the-face-of-washington/feed/0A house made entirely of Legohttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-house-made-entirely-of-lego/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-house-made-entirely-of-lego/#commentsThu, 23 Sep 2010 14:20:09 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=147550Before James May could climb his Lego stairs, take his Lego shower, pat his Lego cat and sleep in his Lego bed, there were a few obstacles

Opinions may differ on what it takes to think of constructing a full-sized Lego house. On a spectrum running from “genius” to “arrested childhood,” observers might reasonably locate the idea just about anywhere. But as British TV host James May—a man who inspires the same gamut of responses from viewers—demonstrates in his new book, James May’s Lego House, it takes real ingenuity to actually build one. For starters, no planning department in its right bureaucratic mind would give the go-ahead for a dwelling made entirely of the ubiquitous (300 billion worldwide and counting) Danish children’s building blocks. The insurance premiums were not, as might be expected, brutally high, but that’s only because no insurer was willing to take it on at any price. Then there’s the matter of the necessary components: 3.3 million pieces, mostly the standard eight-stud, 32-mm-long brick model, put a strain on the supply chain, not to mention the labour force. And don’t even start on the issue of fashioning a functioning Lego toilet. In short, there were miles to go and endless questions to answer before May could open his Lego door, climb his Lego stairs and go to sleep in his Lego bed, albeit without wearing Lego pyjamas.

The genesis of the project came from the fertile imagination of the 47-year-old May, co-host of the BBC automotive show Top Gear, victor over chef Gordon Ramsay in an infamous animal penis eating contest during a 2007 episode of the foul-mouthed Ramsay’s F-Word TV series, and all-round champion of toys-for-grown-boys. In 2009, May, a passionate evangelist for what he considers “real” toys—the ones from his childhood, as opposed to the virtual toys and games of the video era—created a six-part series called James May’s Toy Stories. After crafting a plastic model of a Second World War Spitfire fighter plane, a Plasticine garden, a Meccano footbridge and a plastic slot-car racing track—all constructed from traditional children’s play kits but made fully life-sized—it was on to the Lego project. (The final episode saw the construction of a 16-km railway from model train materials.)

Like all of May’s toy projects, the Lego house depended upon an army of volunteers. Some, like architect Barnaby Gunning and interior designer Christina Fallah, were experts, but most were needed simply to lend a helping hand. After May realized that urban planning permission was not going to happen, he found a Surrey winery willing to provide a plot of land. When Gunning and May went to visit the vineyard, the architect noted he was still rather uneasy about working with a material whose “greatest merit lies in its ability to come apart easily.” Gunning soon realized that his original idea—walls made of a single “skin” of bricks and therefore only 16 mm thick—was not going to hold up a house, especially not when May was inside it. (May had his own level of nervousness: right up until his formal entry for a single night’s sleep, he kept mulling over Gunning’s cautious judgment that everything “should” be safe.)

The house was going to require super-bricks: hollow Lego modular blocks, each one 12 of the eight-stud bricks long, six wide and eight high: 272 bricks in total. And that meant, May realized, “either hundreds and hundreds of days or hundreds and hundreds of people.” So he made a televised call to the British public for volunteers, and the nation’s Lego fanatics responded like boat owners at the Dunkirk evacuation. On Aug. 1, 2009, hundreds lined up by 5:30 a.m. for the first day of construction. Despite a second appeal, this time for people not to come, some 4,000 eventually turned up at the winery. The site could only cope with 1,100, and the rest had to be sent away. The lucky few were put to work snapping together the modules in solid black, white, blue, yellow or red.

By then Gunning’s design had evolved considerably, based on Lego’s own mathematical logic. The eight-stud brick “scales upward in multiples of two,” he had noticed, “and if you multiply each of a brick’s dimensions by 256, which is two to the power of eight, you get a shape about two metres in height from floor to floor, slightly smaller than usual but quite nice.” With that discovery, he told May he had a 1:256 scale model of the two-storey home ready to show, and handed over two Lego blocks snapped together, one on top of the other: “Here’s your model.” The rectangular house, then, would be austere in its shape, but riotous in its colours.

Meanwhile, interior designer Christina Fallah, hampered (in her own account) by a Barbie-filled and Lego-less childhood, was playing with bricks in her office, trying to create tiny furniture models that would neither fall apart when used nor be lost against the wall’s bands of colour. Blue and white kitchen chairs kept collapsing under May’s weight until Fallah found a way to hide some reinforcements within the layers of blocks. (May still managed, on his night of occupancy, to crash through his red swivel chair.) Fallah was more successful in her second aim. Her household appliances stood out in an instantly recognizable way through the use of black eight-studs to form letters on lighter backgrounds: bricks spelled out JUG on the white milk container; CHOP ran across the yellow cutting board; and two otherwise puzzling white towers bear S and P.
May had his supersized modules, his interior designs and his construction volunteers ready when he ran into the insurance obstacle. No existing data on Lego as a home-building material meant no insurance company would confirm the architectural plans were sound, and without insurance the project could not legally proceed. Insurers demanded a wooden frame, ignoring May’s despairing cry that it “would completely defeat our object of using Lego as a building material.” Then Gunning saved the day: if the modules were formed around wooden posts and beams, but did not touch them, the house would be insurable and still made of self-supporting Lego.

The house, cement- and drywall-free as it was, began to rise rapidly, until a final crisis occurred: a shortage of bricks in the approved colours. First, Gunning and the chief builder—a bald young man described by May as “just like Bob the Builder except his name is Victor and he’s missing the snap-on hairpiece”—tried to convince May to turn half the upper floor into a brick-saving veranda. “Do me the enormity of shutting up,” an unimpressed May snapped at Victor.

The next day Victor, an evident believer that construction deadlines trump design principles, was on site in the absence of client, architect and designer. He ordered the workers to start adding modules of whatever colour lay to hand. Fallah then arrived and, after carrying on in a mild meltdown about the “awful Winnie-the-Pooh brown colour,” made them tear down the new section, causing a two-day delay—272 bricks can go on as a single module, but they come off one 32-mm brick at a time.

Before open warfare erupted, an emergency truck from Denmark arrived with a half-million bricks of the right colours. After six weeks of construction, four more than planned, the house was finished.

On the great day of moving in, May entered another dimension, one that felt, he writes, “not like stepping into a massive house made out of Lego, but like being shrunk and stepping into a tiny Lego-scale house.”

From an open newspaper (featuring a Page 3 Sunshine Girl with strangely square nipples) to a cat modelled after Fusker (the May family pet), it was all Lego. As for the tricky problem of the toilet, May rightly calls the device—complete with ballcock and flushing mechanism made of Lego, the work of a Lego fanatic named Kevin Cooper—the house’s pièce de résistance. May’s Lego shower leaked, and his Lego sink leaked, but not his Lego toilet: Cooper had lined it with vaseline. Despite a night spent on a brick-hard pillow, May was delighted. His home had answered a question he recalled his six-year-old self obsessively asking: “If you had enough Lego, could you build a house?”

Too bad he had to tear it down. The winery wanted its land back and the Legoland theme park at Windsor, to which May had planned to transfer the house, was deterred by the $100,000 cost. Five days after one man spent one night in it, dismantling began. The 3.3 million components were donated to charity. Or almost all of them. Before demolition someone stole Fusker (the brick cat, not the living one). Somewhere, and not just in James May’s imagination, a part of the Lego house lives on.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-house-made-entirely-of-lego/feed/10Design for Obama is super, manhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/design-for-obama-is-super-man/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/design-for-obama-is-super-man/#commentsTue, 27 Oct 2009 00:28:35 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=89040A year or so ago, a group of graphic designers asked themselves how they could best use their skills and talents to help Barack Obama. The solution was “Design for…

]]>A year or so ago, a group of graphic designers asked themselves how they could best use their skills and talents to help Barack Obama. The solution was “Design for Obama”, which is just an elliptical way of saying, “propaganda”. I’d guess that no president in history has been given the full Warhol the way Obama has, from the infamous Shep Fairey HOPE poster to the racist Russian Obama ice cream.

Anyway, the Design for Obama project is going to be a book from Taschen. Meanwhile, you can check out the website for all the submissions, or just dig this image I snapped in an alley just off the Bowery a while ago:

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/design-for-obama-is-super-man/feed/8Not recommended if you have catshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/not-recommended-if-you-have-cats/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/not-recommended-if-you-have-cats/#commentsThu, 21 May 2009 12:00:00 +0000http://tearsheet.ca/dev/?p=3529Cardboard's being used to make everything from footbridges to cribs. Caution is advised.

]]>Designers and celebrities have a new eco-sustainable, authentic material to champion: cardboard. Long derided as a “hobo’s IKEA,” it’s being used to make, among other things, furniture, handbags, pianos, even bridges. There are horse-print cardboard wall coverings in the changing rooms of Stella McCartney’s Paris store; English actor Colin Firth’s London-based furniture shop sells corrugated cardboard chairs, and the elite design firm Vitra offers Frank Gehry’s “Easy Edges” cardboard line.

In the upscale Toronto restaurant Mildred’s Temple Kitchen, cardboard stools complement leather sofas with suede and satin pillows. Designed by Vancouver-based Molo, these iconic “Softseating” pieces are now in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Installed in the restaurant last November, the stools no longer look new: cardboard tends to look “pretty beaten up” very quickly, says restaurant manager Jane McMahon, which is “apparently part of the appeal.”

Sarah Frater has written about cardboard for the London-based magazine Design Week. In her research, she was surprised by the number of products now being sold in cardboard, including laptop cases and seating. Cardboard has “a new wave of enthusiasts,” she says, because it is “alive with possibilities.”

Among those possibilities are a cardboard footbridge, reinforced with metal, built across the Gardon River in the south of France in 2007 by renowned Japanese architect Shigeru Ban (it was taken down a few weeks later for the rainy season), a cardboard grand piano that sounds like the real thing, built by the Swedish firm SCA Packaging, and cardboard grandfather clocks made by the London designer Giles Miller.

The Dutch branding firm Nothing has an entire office built out of cardboard, including stairs, desks and shelves. The cardboard office has a natural, rough-edged aesthetic; a renowned Russian illustrator has painted vignettes and figures on the cardboard walls. The decor tends to damage easily—someone recently ran into a plant box, and a piece broke off. Although broken furniture is not expensive to replace, it can take days to assemble and, says Bas Korsten, co-founder of Nothing, “you have to have spare parts and furniture lying about.”

Indeed, while cardboard products have been embraced by the avant-garde, ownership can present challenges. Cardboard can be treated to make it more resilient, but it’s also highly absorbent, and you need to be careful what you spill, says Glen Kadelbach, founder of Minnesota-based Innovative Cardboard, which manufactures a line of furniture, including tables, chairs and shelving. Cats and other scratchy animals are also off limits, he says.

On the other hand, if you’re not good at keeping things dry, or if you have young children, you can decide not to worry about spills and embrace the blemishes. The material marks quickly, Korsten says, but then “the coffee stains are part of the design.”

Sometimes, the products are praised by critics, but panned by the people who buy them. In 2006, the British baby-wear store Mothercare launched the cardboard crib, championed as “intelligent eco-design” by Treehugger and other environmental sites. Writing on a Web forum, however, one parent complained it was “completely impractical” since the mattress didn’t fit properly into the cardboard bed (probably because it had to be self-assembled). Others worried that it didn’t look safe and might collapse, with their progeny inside.

Safety hasn’t been an issue for Rick Thomchick, a Silicon Valley technical writer who lets his three-year-old daughter romp on his cardboard chairs. Thomchick built the armchairs after being inspired by the Gehry line. The finished products last several years but have now been banished to the garage because of their “distinct odour”—they “smell like paper pulp,” says their owner.

For Thomchick, cardboard furniture is more plaything than high-end decor, and durability is less of a concern than the doing-it-yourself challenge. Yet those who buy the pieces fully assembled, or who spend thousands of dollars on an item, may not be so happy. The designer items sold in showrooms may look fabulous now, says Gareth Williams, a professor at the London-based Royal College of Art, but in 30 years they could resemble “a pile of old boxes.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/not-recommended-if-you-have-cats/feed/4“People’s designer” believes bad times will stoke better designhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/peoples-designer-believes-bad-times-will-stoke-better-design/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/peoples-designer-believes-bad-times-will-stoke-better-design/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2009 15:00:43 +0000http://blog.macleans.ca/?p=38693British design guru Sir Terence Conran predicts the current economic downturn will purge the dross from the high end of the marketplace and offer a creative catalyst for good, affordable…

]]>British design guru Sir Terence Conran predicts the current economic downturn will purge the dross from the high end of the marketplace and offer a creative catalyst for good, affordable design, reports the Times of London. The demise of venerable Wedgwood didn’t surprise the design innovator and restaurateur, whose business continues to thrive. A few years ago he recalls he told the Wedgwood directors: “You’re making products that nobody uses . . .There’s nothing for people to break and replace.” He also expresses hope the recession “will stop all that ersatz Tudor-beathan ridiculous stuff,” noting that while mass house builders continue to reproduce bad design “in front of that house is a rather intelligently designed car and inside there is good audiovisual equipment, good kitchen equipment. It’s only the house that holds it all that is still so out of date.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/peoples-designer-believes-bad-times-will-stoke-better-design/feed/0Back to the drawing boardhttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/back-to-the-drawing-board/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/back-to-the-drawing-board/#commentsSun, 14 Dec 2008 19:36:18 +0000http://blog.macleans.ca/?p=24264.
Yeah, I’m glad they rejected this one too. From a fascinating little article on the development of the Obama campaign logo.…